Best Metaphor Poems

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
...

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
...

(love is like)
Love is like a painting
filled with all colours and shades
love is like a bleeding heart
...

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
...

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
...

The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
...

I'd like to write - like grown-up poets do:
with similes that span the universe,
that sparkle, crackle, dazzle, woo the mind;
and touch the heart with tender, swoony verse...
...

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
...

A pretty girl
is like a simile
and vice-a-versa
so I'd say
...

If one could bridge the distance with a word,
A journey would become a pilgrimage.
Elegant letters slant across the page.
My leaf has found a home upon your coat.
...

The first poem was a wonder
The second was a surprise.
The third poem made me a poet,
The fourth gave me a name and fame.
...

Intoxicated by the inspiration
Of his trade—
With mental powers at work,
A true poet rarely sleeps.
...

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
...

Loved to write as far back as memory goes
Without any thought for a verse to compose

Poetic expressions of innate creativity
...

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith 'A whole I planned,
...

The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—
...

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
...

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
...

Everyone but poets
(who have their own allegiances)
would acknowledge it – you were, and I guess still are,
the most famous and popular poet of
...

Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps
...

mon semblable, mon frère
(1)
Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction
In that perspective of the action
...

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds
That feed on some foul parasite
Of the Moroccan flocks and herds
Cross the narrow Straits to light
...

Christopher Robin and Pooh walked slowly down the path in the woods, treading on the occasional crackly twig.

'CR...' said Pooh, 'What's a Poeh Tree? Is it the same as a Poem, or a hum? '
...

PROCESSIONS that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
...

She said: the pitying audience melt in tears,
But Fate and Jove had stopp'd the Baron's ears.
In vain Thalestris with reproach assails,
For who can move when fair Belinda fails?
...

.
Your friend belittled your topic
Your friend belittled your style
Your friend belittled your lack of rhyme
...

Phoebus, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade,
Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,
For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,
She took to the tree to escape his pursuing
...

Sitting under the Banyan tree I watch the water hitting its raised roots
Restless and agitated as a disturbed mind.
It's effervescence matching my own state of mind.
On the sun baked land the Banyan tree stands alone in silent meditation.
...

That one small boy with a face like pallid cheese
And burnt-out little eyes could make a blaze
As brazen, fierce and huge, as red and gold
And zany yellow as the one that spoiled
...

Remembering a Valentine sent to me by a poet from India,1989
You meet the moment with your solace thought.
Your fingers sketch a gray house far away.
Its window lights are warming cool resolve.
...

For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
...

Bitten by a love bug,
My heart swells with oedema
My love, like gnawing anxiety,
Burdens me
...

Time over Tuesday, August almost gone,
So little left of summer to dream on.
I write a poem on the windowglass.
Quatrains waver like shadows in the grass.
...

He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
...

Your kiss
was like a tsunami

such
...

O! love to me is but a season –
Seldom does it overstay,
And tho' I pain to seek a reason,
Like the dream, it fades away
...

The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry
His power is his left hand
It is idle weak and precious
His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him
...

Metaphor’s the soul of poetry:
this incongruous instrument of speech
with which we say one thing,
when we mean quite another:
...

Your bum
stuck up in the air

beautiful
...

This is where the typhoon starts—
inside the fourth paragraph,
ten city blocks away,
...

Sighting her in opposite mirror
Like a boundless poetic mirage
Finding no words I surrender
To the beauty unfolding its image
...

1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
...

'How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh,
Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening's ear,
Were discord to the speaking quietude
...

Two birds rest on the same tree;
their eyes are bright;

they look alike; yet one
...

Pooh liked Autumn. Autumn means walking with a scarf round your neck and sometimes seeing your breath in the air like a silent conversation, and wet leaves underfoot and twigs going crackle or sometimes crack! which can be scary if you aren't holding CR's hand.

So here they are, walking together paw-in-hand down the path in Hundred-Acre Wood, and Pooh is humming a happy hum with words looking for it, rather like inquisitive flies that don't quite land on you, wondering if they should stay or not, and how the other flies feel if two of them land together...
...

- My Stella - 74
Death

Death seems dreadful to all aspirant hearts,
...

Even as on some black background full of night
And hollow storm in cloudy disarray,
The forceful brush of some great master may
More brilliantly evoke a higher light;
...

Silent, they speak
of the elemental:
clear as water, clear as air,
bright as fire, sparkling as sunlight,
...

When I was very young,
Poetry
was written by
AA Milne.
...

Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
...

Last night the seawind was to me
A metaphor of liberty,
And every wave along the beach
A starlit music seemed to be.
...

He's as high as a georgia pine, my father'd say, half laughing. southern trees
as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.
...

The world has lost the ear for rhyme.
It still makes children squirm with pleasure;
and from some witty pens and minds, its fireworks fizz;
so, after all these centuries of rhyme
...

...

Defenseless I lay, cuddled up snugly in bed;
I'd done nothing to invite his appearance in my head
Except to drink in the danger of manic eyes
Earlier in the flickering light of his odd-guy guise.
...

His shoulder did I hold
Too high that I, o'erbold
Weak one,
Should lean thereon.
...

...
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het'rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
...

Help how much my heart hurts
my mouth is as dry as a desert
my throught is sore
my voice is a goner
...

O Love! O Glory! what are ye who fly
Around us ever, rarely to alight?
There's not a meteor in the polar sky
Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.
...

HE.
Halt here awhile. That mossy-cushioned seat
Is for your queenliness a natural throne;
As I am fitly couched on this low sward,
...

61 Farmers

Sons of soil who answer
The plea of human hunger
...

You'd never have thought the Queen was Helen's sister- Troy's
burning-flower from Sparta, the beautiful sea-flower
Cut in clear stone, crowned with the fragrant golden mane, she
the ageless, the uncontaminable-
...

Who am I to say to you
what I say to you?
I was not a stone polished by water
and became a face
nor was I a cane punctured by the wind
and became a flute...

I am a dice player,
...

I create and destroy
I am the wheel sunk in the mud
I am the path and the clouded dust
I am you
...

The starter was served awfully before than-
You arrived;
The end is way afar yet.
And you have already relinquished;
...

He’ll be the next to go.
In the Condemned Block, over many years,
he’s moved up the line; now he’s got that end cell.
All legal processes have been tested.
...

Think of our blindness where the water burned!
Are we so certain that those wings, returned
And turning, we had half discerned
...

Oh many times did Ernest Hyde and I
Argue about the freedom of the will.
My favorite metaphor was Prickett's cow
Roped out to grass, and free you know as far
...

I

If thou canst bear
Strong meat of simple truth
...

I.
How pleasant were the songs of Toobonai,
When Summer's Sun went down the coral bay!
Come, let us to the islet's softest shade,
...

I'm through with this grand looking-glass hotel
where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns;
methinks I shall absent me for a while
from rhetoric of these rococo queens.
...

‘POETICS’ concocted with decent science
When ARISTOTLE the noble treatise design,

Brooded the BARD with ionic pen
...

By your unnumbered charities
A miracle disclose,
Lord of the Images, whose love
The eyelids and the rose
...

How I remember the waiting room,
at my Daddy's oncologist's office-
If being eaten alive by cancer isn't enough-
The waiting room is full of old boring, dated
...

Oh poetry my friend inside, dormant thoughts lie,
Anger writes the feelings in the speed of thought,
I swing the axe to split the block of inspiration
Mind Pictures in my words sleeping under dreams.
...

The problem is metaphoric;
I live inside lines
which only approximate
but do not satisfy.
...

Evergreen is a good metaphor for personage.
Transmutation through DNA; evolution through the ages.
The forest is struggling, and so is humanity.
Growth is a godsend; preservation is a calamity.
...

Flowers are the real definition of beauty and elegance.
Different in color, size, and variety, it has unique relevance.
It survives from generation to generation.
Indeed, this is one of God's greatest creations.
...

She was a riddle in four syllables.
She had two names,
The other, Victoria Lucas.
She was a red fruit met with indifference.
...

and perhaps I came to poetry too late
to dive, a slimmish youth,
innocent as youth was or is
into the rich waters of the lake of metaphor
...

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
confusing to say hello again so I said
...

The poem
under the magnetic penguin
on the fridge door
will explain everything
...

Dear love, though I am a hopeless correspondent,
I found your letter habits lacking too
Till I received your card from H.-lulu.
It made me more-than-slightly-less despondent
...

Thank Heaven, the burthens on the heart
Are not half known till they depart!
...

Like a favourite vase,
newly washed, saying
I'm beautiful as I am,
empty yet shining,
...

and there was this one
which I was particularly proud of
where I thought I’d caught
just the right pace, then
...

Icarus
has had a bad press
throughout history
as some sort of moral metaphor
...

Gathering rosebuds with my rake;
the wooden tines scraping
over the gravel path
bringing a token of order
...

Spiky, a mass of spikes more threatening than sharp -
what are they fending off, what are they protecting
so fiercely with their green carapace like a thoughtful womb,
dropping their hidden beauties in reflective autumn
...

In my mind rambles
ideas which seek to unscramble
and grant me crystal clear consistency
but the more I try to wrangle
...

Sarojini Naidu was born in 1879
In a Bengali Hindu family at Hyderabad, India
She is popularly known as ‘Nightingale of India'
For her delightful verses with social impact and influence
...

Sometimes fat fingers on the keyboard
produce the surreal that leaves me
not cursing as usual
at the way my brain brain he says
...

Once more he tried, before he slept,
to rule his ranks of words. They broke
from his planned choir, lolled, slouched and kept
their tone, their pitch, their meaning crude;
...

The name means
wisdom. Perhaps
we should leave it there. For
the human mind loves
...

After you’ve negotiated that artfully-conceived
sharp elbow bend in the long, grand drive
through the fields of its estate,
and it hoves into view,
...

To coin a metaphor:

It's like a Protestant
wandering into a Catholic church
...

7 is my life digit
The sum of 3+4
Joy it doth elicit
Christ metaphor
...

Poets use metaphor in poetry
To tell one thing to mean another
Behind the curtain under the layers
They hide thousand meanings
...

Angels..
do you believe in angels?
do angels believe in you?
which question, the more sensible?
...

True, I can rhyme – endwords, and inner too;
fangle fine assonance, like thought made new;
march to a metre –regular in tread
or cunningly disjointed – silken, the thread
...